Matt Hayler

I’m travelling at the moment, lucky enough to have been in Australia, and now in New Zealand. At the start of some of the talks I’ve given out here, while the session is being introduced, some academics will give a mention to the indigenous peoples who’s lands have been variously occupied, forgotten, remembered, or generously offered so that we might gather there. It’s something you increasingly hear in Canada too, though I’ve never heard it in the States (maybe it happens at some institutions? I’d love to hear about it if so); I have no doubt the same politics of loss, theft, neighbourhood, and truce are present at a great many (most?) places across the globe, unevenly acknowledged. You can’t help but be struck by the different stories that we tell about the landscapes we inhabit once it’s called to mind: “this is the economics and sciences building, and it’s…

“Entanglement” is probably my favourite theoretical term at the moment. I write and teach, most frequently, about humans and their artefacts, about the ways in which we become entangled with our tools, and my sense of the intensity of that idea has deepened as I’ve explored it in work from philosophy, cognitive science, sociology, critical theory, anthropology, and archaeology. To be entangled doesn’t just mean that we use things a lot, and it doesn’t mean, just, that we’re shaped by the things that we use. To be entangled is to recognise that the flow of agency moves both ways – we alter our tools as our tools alter us; we domesticate one another. We see these kinds of entanglements in nature all the time, with parasites, symbionts, and predator-prey relationships. In my book, I draw on the work of Henry Plotkin and his example of the stick insect, a creature…

In a chapter called “Against Allegory,” in his book J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (2004), Derek Attridge argues that we should, more often, stop asking what a text “really means.” He’s writing about the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee, a writer who critiqued the structures and policies of apartheid and whose writing was yet allowed through the censors of the regime that enforced this bureaucratic racism because sympathetic academics on the censorship board could persuasively say that he was writing about something else entirely. Because of the conditions under which his work was published, Coetzee, Attridge argues, tends to be read as someone hiding his true meaning: even as his work rarely deals with the specificities of South African politics, set in different (and often ambiguous) times and places, it still tends to be read as “standing in” for apartheid, as being an allegory for the politics of…

Ambient Literature Co-investigator Matt Hayler recently gave a talk for the terrific Contemporary Philosophy of Technology Research Group at the University of Birmingham. While it’s not focused on ambient literature, it provides a great background for thinking about the larger frame within which some of our research lives.

I’ve been thinking about ambience (unsurprisingly) and what it might mean. I’ve been really keen to get away from the idea of ambience as simply “background/backdrop;” this doesn’t seem, to me, to be what we’re talking about at all. Or it didn’t. But maybe I’ve been doing background a disservice, or, rather, I think background gets done a disservice. Background isn’t unimportant, and it doesn’t just hide or get hidden — background does. Background is constant, consistent, imminent, but it’s also intrusive. Background structures, but not just as something that sets the scene. If ambience is background then I suspect that it’s because background is a conversational thing. If you’re looking at a photo, a portrait, then the background matters. The subject may be a human head, but the background is what makes the portrait. There is no photo without the background; if the photo is so zoomed in that…

All spaces touched by humans will have their own encircling information stretching out over space and time. In our landscapes we have the traces of fossils, bones, cairns and other graveyards, architecture of all kinds, and the worked and reworked soil of farmlands, coal mines, gasworks, orchards, and forests. In our cultural lives we have oral histories, gossip, overheard conversations, interlocutors, artworks, adverts, announcements, preachers, signs, warnings, and portents. And to this patchwork we’ve added radiowaves, microwaves, wifi, Bluetooth, cellular data, transcontinental and transpacific and transatlantic internet cables, and the other trillion wires of ubiquitous computing, household homeostasis, and surveillance infrastructure. There are always stories to be read and written around us, always stories in the air; to quote the movie Aliens: “they’re in the walls.” To me, Ambient Literature is a literature which explicitly responds to this knowledge and recognises its distinctive character and intensification in our current moment.…

About the Ambient Literature project

Ambient Literature is a two-year collaboration between UWE Bristol, Bath Spa University and the University of Birmingham, established to investigate the locational and technological future of the book. Funded through a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project is focused on the study of emergent forms of literature that make use of novel technologies and social practices in order to create robust and evocative experiences for readers. Read more >>

Join the Ambient Literature team at the Hay Festival, May 24th – June 3rd, where we'll be offering workshops, a discussion panel, and debuting a new work, Words We Never Wrote.More Information